


Cap Didn't Get Iced for This Shit

by buckyjerkbarnes



Series: Steve Rogers is Tired of this Malarkey [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, GiveCapABoyfriend, Happy Ending, Homecoming, I am appauled and this is my response to it, M/M, Press Conferences, Steve Rogers is Not Hydra, Steve Rogers is Not a Nazi, Steve Rogers is a man of kindness and love, Steve Rogers is good, assembled avengers, bucky heard people were talking shit about steve, he had to make sure his boy was okay, ish, mentions of various social issues in the US, not civil war compliant, steve is done with every body's shit, warning for discussion of the holocaust in stark detail, you go Bucky, you're damn skippy this is shade at nick spencer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-10 18:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6999967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckyjerkbarnes/pseuds/buckyjerkbarnes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"No, you hang on a second," Sam snapped, more at Spencer than at Steve. "This guy? You think this guy right here is a Hydra agent? Did you fall down a couple hundred flights of stairs before you came in? Have you not turned on the news in the last six months?" </p><p> </p><p>[in which Steve is most certainly NOT a Nazi and Bucky comes home for the first time in seventy years]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cap Didn't Get Iced for This Shit

**Author's Note:**

> Just a note- the phrase "it began to rain cats and dogs" is used and I know many are aware it just means it's raining VERY hard, but English is weird and our metaphors/similes/whatever are even weirder so yeah! Just a little PSA!!!

_Manhattan, 2015._

*

Steve really fucking hated press conferences. He hated how the beady, unfeeling eyes of the cameras were focused on them- on his teammates, on  _his every waking move_ _-_ for an hour with not a single thing missed in-between. 

(For the last seventeen minutes, Natasha had been carefully painting her nails, using the cover of her name placard to do so. The polish was a brilliant, bloody red. It suited her.)

Thor had been scrawling Norse symbols on the edge of a napkin, though he did chime in brightly when the time came for it. Steve believed if Thor had been thoroughly briefed in the current going-on’s of United States politics and foreign policy, the god of Thunder would likely be offering up grand, cosmic-level fixes to mend the issues at hand.

Meanwhile, Clint and Sam were doodling little birds and comparing them: Clint used a purple pen, Sam gripping at a red Sharpie. Some of the little creatures had blurbs coming from their beaks, saying silly things like **“CAW CAW, MOTHERFUCKER”** and **“YOU’D HAVE NEVER LASTED IN THE CIRCUS”**. Clint had also kept up a steady text conversation with Wanda from back at the compound. She sent him sweet little pictures of Vision, of the sad excuse of a dish the red humanoid had tried to cook up for her. It was cute. Really.Clint had tipped the phone for him to see and a smile crooked up the corners of his mouth and stayed there.

Tony? Tony wasn't even remotely acting as though he was paying attention. All the questions about finances had gotten thrown into the open in the first few minutes and he’d be pretty good about not striking up any scandals since he and Miss Potts became a thing. Well, except for the whole bit with the Mandarin. No one really spoke much to Dr. Banner, though he liked to entertain questions about advancements in gene mutations and how some could be used to, potentially, cure cancer, each carefully worded as not to bring out the Other Guy in the midst of a crowded room.

So, obviously, Steve took the bulk of the questions. 

It was pretty decent stuff: "What's one thing about the future you're happy exists?" ("Well, ma'am, it's pretty nice to see that there are vaccines for a great deal of illnesses that I, myself, suffered from when I was young. Just so long as parents take action and have their kids vaccinated... And also, the internet.") "What's your work out regiment look like?" 

This was the only time Sam had spoken up, deadpanning into the microphone: "He never skips leg day." 

Steve had nodded, cracking a grin: "It's true." 

"What's your favorite book of the latter half of the twentieth century?" ("I'm partial to  _Slaughter-House Five_ by Vonnegut. I like the disjointedness of it all, only to find, as you keep reading, it's not disjointed in the least.")

There was a small bump in the road, with Christine Everhart asking, voice raised and clear over the crowd: “Captain Rogers! Have you any idea of the whereabouts of the Winter Soldier?”

Something in Steve’s chest twisted, like he’d been stabbed there. _If I knew where he was, sister, I damn well wouldn’t be here._ “His name is James Buchannan Barnes, you mean,” he said instead, face going tight and neutral. He felt rather than saw Natasha go still from his left, Sam going tense at his right. “America’s longest held prisoner of war. And no. I don’t know where he is. Anyone at this table can vouch for that.”

“Aye,” Thor said, nodding. His face was stony and his eyes were a dangerous electric blue. A handgun, a small, sleek thing, had appeared in front of Natasha. He’d not even seen her move. “A search is in motion, but every rock we have over-turned has been void of our Shield Brother’s fallen companion.”

Natasha did not utter a word. In fact, all she had to do was sit a little straighter in her chair, folding her legs under the table with an _I will track each and every one of you to your homes and burn everything you ever loved_ expression on her pale face, green irises flashing and searing holes into Everhart’s pantsuit.

Questions became terse and simple, borderline  _useless_ after this _. What do you do for fun? How do you feel about this? Will you be sent to x place or y?_ The others spoke up, Sam’s arm sneaking up along the back of Steve’s chair to squeeze gently at the meat of his shoulder before falling down to the table to pick up with his and Clint’s game again. 

The clock on the wall declared that there was a grand two minutes remaining in the Q & A when  _it_ happened. 

"Cap!" one man was saying, loud and extremely persistent. Just to get him to quiet, Tony jabbed a finger at him. 

"Little man in the back! Mr…?" 

The man launched to his feet, grinning and a sweaty and looking  _proud_. "Spencer! Mr. Spencer!”

“This can't be good," Clint murmured out the corner of his mouth. Steve vaguely noticed his latest bird was saying **“OH NO, A WILD IDIOT HAS APPEARED!”**

"Cap," Spencer repeated, a little breathless. He manhandled the mic for a moment before he blurted with the utmost certainty: "Have you told your teammates that you're in deep cover with Hydra yet?" 

As though all the air was sapped from the room, silence descended on each and every person, strangling them. Not a single camera flashed. There was not a soul breathing, nor blinking.

Steve had gone immediately still, his teeth set on edge as an uncomfortably cold, jelly-like feeling erupted beneath his lungs. He felt, faintly, as though he were on the verge of being refrozen in the Arctic. "Would you care to repeat that, son?"

"Oh, no," Tony said, brown eyes blown wide behind his rose-hued sunglasses. " _Oh,_ no. Tatter tot, you've done it now. You should have stayed in your mom’s basement with all your other conspiracy theories...I bet you think Bush did 9/11, that aliens killed Kennedy?" 

The reporter, Spencer,repeated his words. Whispers went up among the crowd, frantic eyes flicking from the tablets in their hands to the man in the back to the Avengers at the front. The absolute randomness of it all made Steve’s head spin. "You listen up, right now, tic-tac-," Sam began furiously, using the same voice he’d aimed at Rumlow over the coms back in DC all those months ago. It was enough to shock Steve back into action.

"Falcon," Steve said, calm as anything without looking down the line at his team. "The question was addressed to me." 

"No, you hang on a second," Sam snapped, more at Spencer than at Steve. "This guy? You think this guy right here is a Hydra agent? Did you fall down a couple hundred flights of stairs before you came in? Have you _not_ turned on the news in the last six months?" 

"Steve Rogers sleeps in a bed with sheets in the pattern of the American flag," Tony said, looking absolutely gob-smacked out the corner of Steve’s eye. His mouth was hanging open; he’d taken off those stupid sunglasses to show just how _done_ he was with Spencer. "His shower curtain is a map of America. I would know because I picked out the decor to his floor in Avengers tower myself and he didn't have the heart to change any of it." 

"He eats patriotism each morning with a spoon of justice," Clint pressed further. He’d faltered in the midst of drawing a new, choppy-looking bird with long, skinny legs and a plump little body in violet. Sam's evenly-proportioned red falcon paled in comparison. 

"I saw him hand out cracker jacks and peanuts at a baseball game to kids," Bruce said, earnest as he cleaned the spotless lenses of his glasses with the lower flaps of his collared shirt. "On more than one occasion. He visits children's hospitals on his downtime. I mean come on; you all have seen the videos of him helping elderly ladies cross the street when traffic is thick." 

"You are wrong, Mister Spencer," Thor agreed. Faintly, the lights of the room flickered and the sound of thunder snarled over their heads. Outside, it began to rain cats and dogs. "The good Captain is of pure nature, not tarnished by blackness as you would have us believe."  

Lightning cracked, illuminating the room a pure, vicious white just as Natasha snarked: "You're a pea-brained buffoon to assert that America's greatest icon of purity is a bigger sinner than all of us. Steve Rogers gave his life so the entire Western hemisphere could _live_."   

"Avengers!" Steve said in the same sort of voice he would just before the belly of the quinjet would open before a mission with each of them dropping or flying off in a different direction. They all sat back a bit in their chairs, they all pressed their mouths into firm lines. "As I said, I believe the question was addressed to  _me._ " 

He leaned forward in his seat, leaving a few inches between himself and the microphone. There was still plenty of room to be heard."How old are you?" Steve pressed.

"Thirty-seven," Spencer said, brow furrowing. A few pens began to move amongst the crowd again. 

"Thirty-seven," Steve echoed. "Thirty-seven years old. You may be older than me physically, but up here?" A gentle finger touched to Steve's temple. "I'm ninety-seven years old. I used to be a poor kid from Brooklyn who lost his Da to mustard gas in the Great War, raised by a wonderful Ma who immigrated here from Ireland. The home I lived in until I was nineteen was two rooms and about as large as one of the men's toilet facilities here. I met my best friend at seven and we battled the Depression together, battled death and illness and a changing government more times than I’d care to count. I used to be a ninety pound asthmatic with a heart murmur, scoliosis, diabetes, astigmatism, and partially deaf in one ear until a German scientist took a chance on me.

"I enlisted in the United States Army because there was a little man in Berlin trying to step on the rest of the world. Because that same little man was plucking good, innocent folk of Jewish descent and carting them off to torture camps and gas chambers and crematoriums; because that little man decided men who loved men and women who loved women deserved to be experimented on; because that little man took people of damaged mind-sets and handicaps and various other impairments and lined them up to be picked off like cattle. I enlisted in the Army because a small, singular bully was trying to have this done to the rest of the world, too, and I was sick of being told to load up scrap metal in a little red wagon like some child when Ja— _Bucky_ and practically all the other men in my neighborhood were on the fronts laying down their lives." 

The man was still smiling, like he was waiting for a grand  _however, you're absolutely right_ amendment.

Clint’s phone vibrated from where he’d left it on the table. It was from Wanda, something Clint was very sure to show him.  _I'm going to drag that lousy, ball-less creature to hell and let the heat melt the block of ice around his tiny brain._ Her threat was enough to spur him on. There would be no need for violence today.

Just words.  

"Hydra was a spawn of a man who believed in the same ideals of Adolf Hitler," Steve continued. He had not lost his tone of controlled anger, but it had almost mellowed out, something he believed his Ma would’ve been proud of. Just the thought of her sweet laugh and her softly-accented voice served to ground him further. "The Red Skull was half-a-man who stole an unfinished super-serum and had every terrible thing inside him become downright demonic, who was bankrolling the opening of  _more_ concentration camps, who was using innocent American, British, French, and Russian soldiers as targets to test the weapons he manufactured. Hydra tried to send a plane with enough nuclear energy to wipe out the entire United States and to stop that, well. You were all around in 2011. You all know the story. I recognize some of your faces from ones that were at our first Avengers press conference back then.

“The team of extraordinary people sitting with me today helped form the Avengers because, even now, with my war over, a new sort of fighting had come to life. This world needs protecting- the little guy needs defending when one terrible man or woman tries to tell him to move: the little guy needs someone, a group of someones, who are willing to stand tall in the face of a terrible situation and say, ‘No, _you_ move.’

"It is Hydra and their Nazi counterparts that caused me to lose my best friend," Steve added. The low-lying anger that had simmered in the very marrow of his bones was cooling. He felt world-weary, like he needed to take another seventy-year nap. A small, selfish part of him hoped Bucky, wherever he was, paused in front of a television. Hoped that he was seeing this conference unroll and _remembered_. "It is Hydra that kept the same man in a cryo-tube off and on for seventy years, who made him into a gun and pointed him at whomever they deemed a threat with no regard for who was good and who was bad and what damage this would cause to their so-called "weapon" in the end if he were ever disassembled. It is Hydra who made him forget the man he used to be, Sergeant James Barnes, son of George and Winfred Barnes, brother to Rebecca, Grace, and Alice. A good soldier, a better man. 

"It is Hydra who manipulated my fellow teammate, Wanda Maximoff, keeping her and her brother captive in one of their experimental cells. 

"It is Hydra who caused the collapse of half of the United States government and launched the impeachment of one-quarter of the House of Representatives, an eighth of Congress, six major positions of Ellis administration, and four of nine Supreme Court Justices. 

"I and the Howling Commandos helped to liberate several major concentration camps towards the end of the war, and though you may be only thirty-seven years old,  _sir,_ you can't be so obtuse as to not have picked up a history book. There have been films made about it, award winning documentaries and autobiographies shown in classrooms around the country so people are sure _not_ to forget the atrocities that occurred. Surely you've seen what those poor people looked like when-  _if-_ they were able to limp their way out alive. You could smell death for miles, smell the scent of human skin burning in the air before the gates even opened. All were malnourished; all looked like a singular bone. 

"If you think," and this was the first time an actual  _growl_ could be heard in Steve's voice. It seemed to shake the man down to the core, to have Steve’s words ripping at his skin, pinning him to the place like nails through the tops of his feet, "for one  _second_ that I would ever consider joining the ranks of Hydra after all that they took from the Jewish race, the various Allied people who served at my side, from Bucky, from  _me_ …” he swallowed, on a note of finality. “I would have rather drowned in the Arctic a million times over, no, a _billion_ times, than ever be just a _pencil-pusher_ for Hydra. No further questions.”

And with that, Steve stood so sharply out of his seat that he knocked it back, stalking right off the stage and heading to exit, into the mid-afternoon light.

The rain had stopped. 

-

_Brooklyn._

_*_

“Fox News is having a field day,” Natasha told him, sitting cross-legged on the couch in his apartment and nursing a take-out box of Kung-Pau chicken. She was scrolling through her phone with a small scowl scrunching up her features. “Twitter is exploding. Again. You’ve got your own hashtag—CapIsNotHydra.” He couldn’t stand to be in the Tower, not right then. Tony, loud though he may be, had been hard at work with his PR department and going about trying to push this entire fiasco out of the way as soon as possible. Just the pitiful stares of the rest of his teammates, especially Wanda, were too much for him to handle.

He’d probably snap at them. At all of them. He would feel like a rat bastard point five seconds afterward.

“Let them,” Steve said, fiddling with one of his chopsticks. “I know what the truth is.”

Clint made a noise of approval. “Cap, you’ve given this country everything you have and more. This is just one man trying to stir the pot—he’s a bored ass-munch with nothing better to do.”

Sam, returning from the kitchen with four fresh bottles of beer, snorted. “Ass-munch? Really?”

The archer raised a hand of defeat, sneaking in to steal a piece of chicken from Natasha. Steve couldn’t help but smile when she didn’t try to stop him, when her eyes flicked to Clint then away and the low-gold light from the lamp caught on the silver bow-and-arrow pendant at her neck. “Hey, you called the guy tic-tac…”

“That’s beside the point, Bird Brain.”

“Boys,” Natasha chided, dryly. “How about we watch a little mind-numbing television, hmm?”

‘Mind-numbing television’ turned out to be this show called Dog Cops, of which Clint was very invested in judging by the way he knew all the names of the dogs and grew animatedly worried whenever one of them was put in danger. He even made a strangled noise of horror when Deputy Doberman sprained one of his paws. “Rip his ass up!” he said, mouth full, to a sturdy German Sheppard, who had on a navy uniform and was, actually, sinking his teeth quite aggressively into the backside of the man who’d caused the Doberman to get hurt.

Natasha wrinkled her nose at him, sharing a _can you believe this guy_? eye roll with Steve. This, quite possibly, was the most relaxed he’d ever seen her and thought that he needed to have these four over for beer and two-star Chinese food more often, just to see such most of the tension drain from her thin shoulders. 

But the hour grew late, and the Dog Cops marathon came to a conclusion.

“Do you want me to stay?” Sam asked, shrugging on his coat and perking the collar just to smooth it down right.

He felt his face do something funny at this. “Sam, you’ve got a group meeting first thing tomorrow,” Steve said quietly, brows furrowed. “Those men and women need you.”

“Man, I’m your friend,” Sam pressed, big brown eyes growing bigger the more sincere he became. “Which means it’s perfectly okay if you need me, too.”

Steve went a bit speechless at that. It was always a bit odd when people who were not brunette and broad and _Bucky_ treated him like a person rather than a piece of propaganda meant to win the war. But the war was over, now. It had been over since 1945, even if he had never admitted it out loud. Here, in his home seven decades into a shiny, metallic future, where Natasha and Clint were pretending not to listen to his and Sam’s conversation from where they were boxing up the remaining food in the kitchen, and Tony was working across the Brooklyn Bridge in the center of Manhattan to make things right, and Thor had altered the _weather_ in his upset, with Bruce sending him playlists of Zen music and online recipes for calming, herbal teas and Wanda shooting him kind texts all evening, Vision offering to wipe the internet of such atrocities, he wondered if this was what having a full family felt like.

(They were not Sarah Rogers and the Barnes-clan, nor the Howlies. They were something new and he appreciated that.)

“I’ll be alright.”

Sam raised a doubtful eyebrow. “I’m calling you-,” a finger jabbed at Steve’s right pectoral. “-first thing tomorrow after the group session lets out.”

He managed to crack a smile. “I’ll be here.”

“We’ll get out of your hair, too,” Clint said by means of exit, Natasha at his left. Their hands brushed. It was a subtle thing.

“Go home to your dog,” Steve said, smile blooming into a grin at the very small flicker of surprise coming to light in both of their faces. “So Tony’s gossip was true, then.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “It’s Clint’s dog.”

“You feed him more pizza than I do,” Clint argued, half-heartedly. The way his gaze lingered affectionately on the side of her face, Steve had no idea how he’d not known they were together sooner. “I think by this point he’s our dog.”

She hummed her assent to this statement. Nat closed what little space was between her and Steve, curling a gentle arm around Steve’s neck and drawing him down so she could peck a soft kiss to his cheek. The movement made him think of that spring day standing next to an empty grave, where threats of pulling threads were released into the wind. His stomach clenched uncomfortably. “Try to get some sleep, okay? And don’t forget to eat something. I ordered extra so you’d have leftovers.”

Steve curled his hands to her back, squeezing her to him tightly for a few seconds before he drew back. A curl had fallen down into her face; he flicked it away, watching it stubbornly bounce back onto her forehead. “I will.”

“Expect calls from us, too,” Clint said, shaking Steve’s hand once Natasha stared him down for a long moment and nodded her approval of his answer. More than likely, Steve would turn off his phone until the next morning as to keep temptation out of mind, would probably sit up by the window across the room and watch the sky fade from ink-black to the pale gray of a Brooklyn morning.

If he was lucky, the sun would be shining.

“I wouldn’t expect anything less,” Steve said, and that was the truth.

He watched them go, latching the door closed in his wake.

Without them, their scents and their voices and their heartbeats filling the empty spaces, loneliness descended on Steve’s shoulders. He felt himself deflate, bringing a heavy hand up to cover the top half of his face.

(When he moved out of the entryway, exactly how long he stood there, Steve knew not, his eyes were red and his nose was running fiercely. He thought of a bombed-out bar and a train whistling through the Alps and frail hands folded on a white bed sheet and the heat of the helicarrier collapsing into the Potomac.)

-

When it rained that night, it was a natural storm rather than that generated by a Norse god. Steve’s bedroom was at the back of the building with a fire-escape attached to the brick wall just outside his window. The door was strategically placed so he could see a threat coming from either down the hall or from the kitchen. He didn’t have many things adorning his walls, nor all that much furniture to fill the empty spaces: there was a chair to sit on when he changed in the mornings, a metal trunk filled with things from the war settled at the foot of his bed, a lamp, a table for him to rest his phone and a few dog-earred paperbacks he was in the process of reading. There was a framed photo of him and Peggy hanging up, though, a grainy image of his mother smiling at the camera, and a treasured snapshot of him and Bucky, pre-War, all in a neat, framed row to the right of his bed.  

There was a little clock, too, glaring at him with the electronic numbers blaring scarlet.

He watched time unspool, watched the hours grow from late to early. The rain picked up and eased off and Steve was lulled by it, for a mere ten minutes.

“You know,” Bucky Barnes said softly from the most shaded corner of Steve’s room. He’d not even heard the window slide open, didn’t see the broad body slip inside from the cold night rain. Had he not been so attuned to Bucky’s voice, he might have yelled in surprise, might have called him a ghost with how silent he was. “There’s a bit of irony here. The fact that someone would accuse _you_ of being a Nazi and not the guy who actually _worked_ for Hydra a better part of the century, I mean.”

Steve could hardly breathe. The smell of petrichor clung to the rusting iron of the fire-escape, sweeping inside with the insistent gusts of wind. It beat around Steve’s nostrils, swirling around Bucky and causing him to detect gunpowder and a touch of body odor, as well. “That wasn’t you, Buck.”

Even in the dim light of the streetlamps, Steve had no problem seeing the painful way Bucky’s mouth twisted. “Yeah,” he murmured. “Maybe not. But I remember it like it was.” 

 _Remember_ , Bucky had said. The words bubbled up and out of Steve before he could stamp them down. That selfish piece of him grew. “Do you remember me?”

The shadow across the room had gone still. It took a moment, a long, worn thin stretch of seconds that made Steve, too, shoot into a straight line. He didn’t sit up, did not move off the bed and kneel before Bucky like he wished to.

Bucky nodded, jerkily. “I don’t know what the hell that guy was thinking, spewing his bullshit at you like that.”

The shadow rose, shed its thick jacket and lost most of its bulk. Boots and socks were slid off, as were jeans and the red Henley covering Bucky’s chest. This left him in nothing but a worn pair of boxers and a white wife beater, metal arm catching the glare of the surrounding buildings and the streetlamp a few floors down. He wasn’t frightened by it because Bucky had shed all his tactical gear and was standing in so few articles of clothing: this was an offering of an olive branch of trust.

Steve took it. Seized it. Clung to it. Wrapped it up so it could not be broken.

He offered a hand to Bucky, pulling back the edge of the sheets with the other. His oldest friend barely hesitated when he slid in, curling close so he and Steve were chest to chest, knee to knee, legs tangled together in a warm pile.

“I’ve followed you around the city,” Bucky said quietly, his gaze focused on Steve’s hair, the way it was pressed flat to his head in one place and sticking up, wildly, no doubt, in others. He looked as though he were itching to reach out and smooth it down. “I’ve seen you walk ladies inside abortion centers so they’d avoid being attacked by mobs. I saw you walk in that Pride parade a few months ago all decked out in the colors of…?” his brows furrowed, like he was trying to think of the precise name.

“The bisexual flag,” Steve told him, a touch faint.

“The bisexual flag,” Bucky nodded. “Right. Followed you down to Ferguson and saw you protest the police brutality against black boys. Flew to Paris when a bomb went off in that stadium and saw you help with the clean-up… You ripped that schmuck Trump a new one on the Today show last month. I was outside the studio.”

“’I want to build a wall,’” Steve said, making his voice loud and booming and so obnoxious it made Bucky snort, a surprised little huff of a sound. “Making America great again… His ideas are such bullshit, Buck. Whenever I see him on the news, I want to get a bullhorn and just _lose it_.”

The corner of Bucky’s mouth poked up. Steve wouldn’t mind staying in this position for the rest of his days; parallel to the man he loved, under warm sheets inside the city he was born in, _safe_. “You didn’t get iced for this shit.”

“Exactly,” Steve agreed, vehemently. Bucky reached out, settling his flesh hand on the column of Steve’s neck. He felt a gentle thumb press into his pulse, timing the beats of his heart to try and lull him into a state of calm once more. “I think,” he said softly, once his throat didn’t feel so tight and the fist of anger that had wrapped around his heart fell away, “that as long as you know who I am, who the real me is, the opinion of the rest of the world doesn’t matter. It never has.”

“Steve,” Bucky muttered, touched, tipping in close enough that their noses brushed. “You’re one sappy bastard.”

“S’your fault,” he mumbled, bringing up a hand to cup Bucky’s cheek in his palm. “I’m serious, though. Your view of me has been the only one that’s ever mattered.”

Their lips touched, breaths catching at the brief sweep of mouths. Emotions were running high and this was, he prayed, just the first night of many he had won back with Bucky. They had time. Steve would make sure of that. “I know who the real Steve is,” Bucky told him, firm and tender all at once.

“I looked for you,” Steve whispered, flattening a hand along Bucky’s ribs.

“I know that, too.”

A wet laugh bubbled up between Steve’s lips, Bucky slipping his metal arm under Steve’s side so he could trace gentle stripes along his spine. “You found me.”

A nod. Soft eyes, a block of ice, melting. “I did.” Bucky pressed their foreheads together. He didn’t know how much he’d missed the sound of Bucky’s heartbeat until it was close enough to invade his hearing, the strong _thumpa-thump_ of it sapping the cold from his veins. “I always will.”

*

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> All we can do in this very shitty situation is hold tight to the Steve Rogers WE know. If you're going to boycott the comic, boycott JUST the Captain America #1 issue, not others. Just shit Nick Spencer is writing. Be loud, be specific, and be willing to do both for a while- getting a comic pulled is not something that can be done over-night. I'm just terribly disgusted that Marvel would rather make Steve Rogers a goddamn Nazi rather than have him drop a comment that's he's bisexual or pan or gay. MCU!Steve is to be protected at all costs! Don't throw out your merchandise. If you've got kids/nieces/nephews, etc. that are upset by Hydra!Cap, explain to them that it's Nick Spencer who is actually Hydra and he is trying to manipulate the soul of Steve Rogers by pulling this stunt. Thank you.
> 
> Feel free to hit me up on [Tumblr](http://sgtbxrnes.co.vu)!
> 
> Also! If you need a pick-me-up after reading this, head on over to my other fic, [like-minded beasts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6888178). Seriously, the premise of it is that T'Challa drops into Brooklyn to check in on Bucky and Steve and he finds a kitten. Adventure ensures :) See you all soon!


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